Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word Microsoft is squishing its major biz products into a single solution called – wait for it – Microsoft 365, CEO Satya Nadella announced at Inspire, Redmond's annual event for businesses that flog its wares. Not a single chair was flung, we can report. Office 365, Windows 10, and enterprise mobility and security, will be peddled …
Microsoft 365 Business... integrates Office 365 Business Premium with tailored security and management features from Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security....
... priced at US $20 per user, per month.
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/07/10/introducing-microsoft-365/?utm_source=IPreferLinux
"No one is willing to pay for an OS now, they're certainly not willing to pay for updates on a yearly basis."
I wish it were true. But... THIS time Micro-shaft can get around the anti-trust stuff (because Linux, Libre Office, Mozilla, Chrome, Apache, gcc+tools, etc. are all FREE) to addict everyone into a subscription model for the entire pile, OS, software, intarweb, social media, *BUNDLED*. It's coming. They just have to accustom us frogs to the lukewarm water before they can crank up the heat.
One Subscription to rule them all (etc.)
I don't think Windows 10 as a whole will be subscription only. Instead, I think that certain features will.
And this is the big issue with FORCED updates. Recall a recent update which removed the group-policy for disabling the Windows Store from Win 10 Pro, relegating it to the Enterprise version, which requires an extra license.
This license will now be available via subscription.
Cue the removal of more and more features from perpetual-license versions, no doubt, perhaps even culminating with the only perpetual-license version being the home edition, with all Pro/Enterprise functionality requiring a subscription.
Windows will become a 'freemium' product. Those of you who have played one of those 'free-to-play' online games will know.
Certain enterprise/'pro' features are unavailable unless you pay a subscription to unlock them. Certain features on the Home edition of Windows will also be siphoned into the new pricing model, albeit at a cheaper price.
Coming to a future forced Windows 'anniversary' update, to bring you more 'innovation'. Ah, now you see why you can't turn off Windows updates indefinitely, and setting up your connection as a 'metered connection' won't save you.
Think this is impossible? Read the revised EULA of Windows 10 again. You don't own the Windows software. Windows as a Service.
Not too long ago, we also thought a Snapchat-like transformation of Skype would be unfathomable.
I think it is possible that Windows becomes a freeium product. Essentially meaning companies will pay and consumers will not.... Only if Chromebook continues to cut into their market share though, which is likely. Not really sure that it works for MSFT though. People who buy CB generally do so bc they like CB, not because they can save 20%. Most consumer users, not all but most, just do not need the thick OS like Windows. That's why they use their phones for most things. Windows, or thick OSs in general, are just becoming a niche product.
What do you think?
The writing was already on the wall when Microsoft refused to sell boxed versions of Windows 10, and the USB stick Windows 10 was unavailable in many countries. The only way you could get Windows 10 was buying a new device, or doing a 'Steam-style' digital download, notably those Windows 7/8 users who had succumbed to the 'upgrade to Windows 10' nagware during that one-year free upgrade period.
I can't wait for ReactOS or some Windows alternative to run all legacy/current Win32 programs effectively, minus all the 'Microsoft cloud ecosystem' nonsense from SatNad. It shall become an emulator not unlike a retro video game emulator for Sega and Nintendo games, while the rest of the world moves on without Microsoft.
You see, Microsoft 365 Enterprise is on a 5-year mission to explore strange new value propositions, to seek out new customers and applications, to boldly grow as no scam spawned before!!
Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 Business dispenses with all the romance of discover and unemotionally operates in keeping with the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
MS' figures are here, supposedly: https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-operations
Got any history documentation for your 40 days claim?
we use o365 over several business in our group. some standalone and some hybrid. There haven't been 40 days outage in the last several years combined, I don't think, let alone this year alone.
You've* done something wrong. Several times probably.
*You the place you work at, not you the person, unless they are one and the same
Yeah so the problem you're missing is that Office 365/Microsoft 365/BOPS/Exchange Online/whatever we called it now is often down for smaller subsets of customers rather than giant cluster-**** outages, and they don't get shown on the global data and status.
There are issues very regularly, with everything from provisioning users to missing calendars and everything in-between.
You might not notice all of them as they don't affect everyone, or you don't use that feature/service/function and so on but they're there - it's notorious for random mini outages
I would suggest your issues don't lie in the MS end of the platform. I've been a 365 user for 6 years, and seen maybe 3 days of outage total in 6 years (granted - there was a couple of hours the other day) - as much as I love to give MS some stick, the 365 platform is pretty rock solid tbh.
The main issues I've seen with O365 is when the local IT don't know how to manage ADFS and DirSync/AAD Connect and make the platform look broken when it's actually the local AD/Authentication that's snookered.
There have been some pretty major outages of Office365 in the US, several of them over the past few years. The problem is that Exchange was never designed to be web scale. There was no web scale when Exchange came out. MSFT could have re written the back end and probably should have, but they wanted to get it to market quickly, as Google was/is moving fast, and sticking with legacy Exchange simplified to some extent the process of moving people.
We had a regional outage on authentication in Azure which borked up not just the SharePoint Online and Dynamics/Office365 access but also our on-prem stuff as that uses AAD in the authentication stage as well via ADFS. This was not reported on the Health page in Office 365 and were it not for an embedded MS employee that alerted us we'd have been none the wiser. This seems almost like a tactic of MS's to avoid people noticing what the real uptime is. If it only reports system-wide outages, that's not really being transparent is it?
"There have been some pretty major outages of Office365 in the US, several of them over the past few years. The problem is that Exchange was never designed to be web scale."
Exchange has been designed for hosting / multi-tenant deployments for about a decade now. It's a scale out model so there really are no practical limits on scalability as long as you can throw additional VMs at it when needed... Current recommended per instance limits are 192GB RAM and 24 processor cores. (Microsoft have said that the supported core count will be upped in the future.)
SKU's already... (Subscription Katalogue Units)
Inevitable, there will be plenty of
"I'm sorry Mr Customer, the Subscription that you are on does not include updates or support. We will be pleased to quote you for another SKU."
"An upgrade then?"
"Upgrades? No. A totally new subscription that by the way has fewer benefits that your existing SKU."
"Fewer? WTF?"
"Yes. But you get updates with this one."
"But we need [insert product name]. That was in the old SKU."
"Yes it was nut we don't offer that any more. To get that product and support and updates, you will need to sell two legs and a kidney. Sign here. Abstraction will be painless."
A little joke but could it be possible? It is impossible to tell what the MS Marketing wonks will come up with next.
Sounds a lot like my damned cable TV company/local monopoly.
"Oh, you want channel A? It has been repositioned in our channel line-up and is now available in bundle X and above."
"Why can't I simply choose the few channels that I watch and just pay for them? I don't need any of those others."
"I'm sorry, we only offer select channel bundles."
<Sigh> "Okay, I guess I'll take bundle X for $50 a month."
"I'm looking at your account. In order to get bundle X, you have to add phone service and increase your data speed to 1 gigabit."
"But I don't need phone service, and 100 megabits is fine for my needs."
"Bundle X is tied to those services. We have no way to separate them."
Etc., etc., ad nauseam. My cable TV company uses 2 shovels to fling all their bullshit....
Well, to be fair, the cable companies get shafted, too. The channels themselves are owned by a few major conglomerates. For example, Discovery, TLC, ID, and a bunch of others are owned by one company, Disney owns the ESPN networks, all Disney networks, and several others (including the one that's still contracted to air The 700 Club). Basically put, THEY won't let the cable companies go a la carte, either (Especially Disney. They KNOW they hold one of the most demanded cable channels and make it a Hobson's Choice--you want ESPN? You take ALL our channels...OR NONE. Leave us and watch your customers defect).
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